ensues.

meats and strong drink; abstemious even beyond the genius of the place, and almost in spite of the remonstrances of his great-aunt, who, though strict, was not rigid,-water was his habitual drink, and his food little beyond the mast and beech-nuts of his favourite groves. It is a medical fact, that this kind of diet, however favourable to the contemplative powers of the primitive hermits, &c., is but ill adapted to the less robust minds and bodies of a later generation. Hypochondria almost constantly It was so in the case of the young Liston. He was subject to sights, and had visions. Those arid beech-nuts, distilled by a complexion naturally adust, mounted into an occiput already prepared to kindle by long seclusion and the fervour of strict Calvinistic notions. In the glooms of Charnwood he was assailed by illusions similar in kind to those which are related of the famous Anthony of Padua. Wild antic faces would ever and anon protrude themselves upon his sensorium. Whether he shut his eyes, or kept them open, the same illusions operated. The darker and more profound were his cogitations, the droller and more whimsical became the apparitions. They buzzed about him thick as flies, flapping at him, flouting him, hooting in his ears, yet with such comic appendages, that what at first was his bane became at length his solace; and he desired no better society than that of his merry phantasmata. We shall presently find in what way this remarkable phenomenon influenced his future destiny.

On the death of Mrs. Sittingbourn we find him received into the family of Mr. Willoughby, an eminent Turkey merchant, resident in Birchin Lane, London. We lose a little while here the chain of his history, by what inducements this gentleman was determined to make him an inmate of his house. Probably he had had some personal kind

ness for Mrs. Sittingbourn formerly; but, however it was, the young man was here treated more like a son than a clerk, though he was nominally but the latter. Different avocations, the change of scene, with that alternation of business and recreation which in its greatest perfection is to be had only in London, appear to have weaned him in a short time from the hypochondriacal affections which had beset him at Charnwood.

In the three years which followed his removal to Birchin Lane, we find him making more than one voyage to the Levant, as chief factor for Mr. Willoughby at the Porte. We could easily fill our biography with the pleasant passages which we have heard him relate as having happened to him at Constantinople; such as his having been taken up, on suspicion of a design of penetrating the seraglio, &c. but, with the deepest convincement of this gentleman's own veracity, we think that some of the stories are of that whimsical, and others of that romantic nature, which, however diverting, would be out of place in a narrative of this kind, which aims not only at strict truth, but at avoiding the very appearance of the contrary.

We will now bring him over the seas again, and suppose him in the counting-house in Birchin Lane, his protector satisfied with the returns of his factorage, and all going on so smoothly, that we may expect to find Mr. Liston at last an opulent merchant upon 'Change, as it is called. But see the turns of destiny! Upon a Summer excursion into Norfolk, in the year 1801, the accidental sight of pretty Sally Parker, as she was called, (then in the Norwich company,) diverted his inclinations at once from commerce; and he became, in the language of common-place biography, stage-struck. Happy for the lovers of mirth was it that our hero took this turn; he might else have been to this hour

that unentertaining character, a plodding London merchant.

We accordingly find him shortly after making his début, as it is called, upon the Norwich boards, in the season of that year, being then in the twentysecond year of his age. Having age. Having a natural bent to tragedy, he chose the part of Pyrrhus, in the Distressed Mother, to Sally Parker's Hermione. We find him afterwards as Barnwell, Altamont, Chamont, &c.; but, as if Nature had destined him to the sock, an unavoidable infirmity absolutely discapacitated him for tragedy. His person, at this latter period of which I have been speaking, was graceful, and even commanding; his countenance set to gravity he had the power of arresting the attention of an audience at first sight almost beyond any other tragic actor. But he could not hold it. To understand this obstacle, we must go back a few years to those appalling reveries at Charnwood. Those illusions, which had vanished before the dissipation of a less recluse life and more free society, now in his solitary tragic studies, and amid the intense calls upon feeling incident to tragic acting, came back upon him with tenfold vividness. In the midst of some most pathetic passage (the parting of Jaffier with his dying friend, for instance,) he would suddenly be surprised with a fit of violent horse-laughter. While the spectators were all sobbing before him with emotion, suddenly one of those grotesque faces would peep out upon him, and he could not resist the impulse. A timely excuse once or twice served his purpose; but no audiences could be expected to bear repeatedly this violation of the continuity of feeling. He describes them (the illusions) as So many demons haunting him, and paralyzing every effort. Even now, I am told, he cannot recite the famous soliloquy in Hamlet, even in private, without immoderate bursts of laughter. However,

what he had not force of reason sufficient to overcome he had good sense enough to turn into emolument, and determined to make a commodity of his distemper. He prudently exchanged the buskin for the sock, and the illusions instantly ceased; or, if they occurred for a short season, by their very cooperation added a zest to his comic vein, some of his most catching faces being (as he expresses it) little more than transcripts and copies of those extraordinary phantasmata.

We have now drawn out our hero's existence to the period when he was about to meet, for the first time, the sympathies of a London audience. The particulars of his success since have been too much before our eyes to render a circumstantial detail of them expedient. I shall only mention, that Mr. Willoughby, his resentments having had time to subside, is at present one of the fastest friends of his old renegado factor; and that Mr. Liston's hopes of Miss Parker vanishing along with his unsuccessful suit to Melpomene, in the Autumn of 1811 he married his present lady, by whom he has been blessed with one son, Philip, and two daughters, Ann and Angustina.*

* Lamb once said, of all the lies he ever put off,-and he put off a good many, indeed he valued himself on being "a matter-of-lie man," believing truth to be too precious to be wasted upon every body,-of all the lies he ever put off, he valued his "Memoir of Liston" the most. "It is," he con

fessed to Miss Hutchinson, "from top to toe, every paragraph, pure invention, and has passed for gospel,-has been republished in the newspapers, and in the penny play-bills of the night, as an authentic account." And yet, notwithstanding its incidents are all imaginary, its facts all fictions, is not Lamb's "Memoir of Liston" a truer and more trustworthy work than any of the productions of those contemptible biographers, unfortunately not yet extinct, so admirably ridiculed in the thirtyfifth Number of the Freeholder? In fact, is not this "lying Life of Liston" a very clever satire on those biographers, who, like the monkish historians mentioned by Fuller in his Church

AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MR. MUNDEN,*

IN A LETTER TO THE EDITOR OF THE

MAGAZINE."'+

66

LONDON

HARK'EE, Mr. Editor!-a word in your ear. They tell me you are going to put me in print,-in print, sir; to publish my life. What is my life to you, sir? What is it to you whether I ever lived at all? My life is a very good life, sir. I am insured at the Pelican, sir. I am threescore years and six,—six ; mark me, sir: but I can play Polonius, which, I believe, few of your corre correspondents can do, sir. I suspect tricks, sir: I smell a rat; I do, I do. You would cog the die upon us; you would, you would, sir. But I will forestall you, sir. You would History of Britain, swell the bowels of their books with empty wind, in default of sufficient solid food to fill them; who, according to Addison, ascribe to the unfortunate persons, whose lives they pretend to write, works which they never wrote, and actions which they never performed; celebrated virtues which they were never famous for, and excuse faults they were never guilty of? And does not Lamb, in this work, very happily ridicule the pedantry and conceit of certain grave and dignified biographers whose works are to be found in most gentlemen's libraries?-EDITOR.

* From the London Magazine, 1825.

+ This is another of Lamb's "lie-children." Leigh Hunt, in his Autobiography, speaking of some of Elia's contributions to the London Magazine thus mentions the mock Memoirs of Liston and Munden: "He [Lamb] wrote in the same magazine two Lives of Liston and Munden, which the public took for serious, and which exhibit an extraordinary jumble of imaginary facts and truth of by-painting. Munden he made born at Stoke Pogis; the very sound of which was like the actor's speaking and digging his words."-EDITOR.